One of the pleasures of working on early modern literature is that, every so often, one encounters a text that has lingered for centuries in the margins: known by name, occasionally cited, but rarely read in full and seldom placed before modern readers in an accessible form. Looke About You is one such play. First performed probably between c.1597 and 1599 by the Admiral’s Men, it is a comic history play set during the reign of Henry II and built around dynastic conflict, court intrigue, mistaken identity, and disguise. With the completion of this new edition, my aim has been to make the play available in a form that remains faithful to its 1600 quarto while also being readable for modern audiences.

Looke About You and the Robin Hood Tradition

At first glance, Looke About You might seem like an oddity within the Robin Hood tradition. The play’s action does not unfold in Sherwood or Barnsdale, nor does it present Robin as an outlaw resisting unjust authority. Instead, the central action takes place at the royal court in London. The main plot concerns the struggle between the ageing King Henry II and the rebellious faction gathered around the younger King Henry, Prince John, and Queen Elinor. At the centre of this political conflict stands Robert, Earl of Gloucester, whose loyalty to Henry II makes him the target of persecution by the younger court party. The poisoning of Rosamond by the counterfeit hermit Skinke sets the action in motion, and once Gloucester’s lands are effectively transferred to Skinke, the Earl’s retaliation becomes the pretext for his imprisonment and apparent ruin.

Its importance for Robin Hood scholarship is greater than has often been recognised. Joseph Ritson cited the play in 1795 as evidence for Robin Hood’s aristocratic identity as Earl of Huntingdon, but Victorian editors such as Gutch and Child largely ignored it. Even later scholars tended to privilege Anthony Munday’s Downfall and Death of Robert, Earl of Huntingdon, with Looke About You remaining in their shadow. One reason for this neglect may be that Robin does not appear here as an outlaw at all, but as a young nobleman in Prince Richard’s service. Yet that very fact makes the play valuable: it reveals another way in which the Robin Hood tradition was adapted for the commercial stage, detached from greenwood rebellion and inserted instead into courtly and dynastic drama.

The Plot of Looke About You

From there the play develops through a highly theatrical series of escapes, disguises, deceptions, and reversals. Skinke, in particular, is one of the play’s most memorable figures: a trickster whose repeated changes of costume and identity make him the chief agent of disorder. Yet Looke About You is not merely a political play. Running alongside the Gloucester plot is a secondary action centred on Marian Faukenbridge, Prince Richard, Sir Richard Faukenbridge, and Robert Hood, Earl of Huntington. Here the play explores chastity, jealousy, desire, and comic misunderstanding. Prince Richard attempts to seduce Marian, while her husband’s suspicion makes him vulnerable to ridicule and manipulation. Robert Hood acts as a kind of mediator in this world of erotic intrigue, linking the comic energies of the subplot to the more dangerous politics of the main action. Marian’s steadfastness, meanwhile, provides an ethical centre to the drama. In a play crowded with disguise and opportunism, she stands for constancy under pressure.

This mixture of political seriousness and comic misrecognition is one of the things that makes the play so interesting. The title itself, Looke About You, captures its atmosphere perfectly: it is a world in which appearances are untrustworthy, in which characters survive by reading situations correctly, and in which a failure of judgment can have both comic and dangerous results. What might otherwise have become a tragedy of aristocratic destruction is repeatedly deflected into theatrical play. In the end, rather than culminating in exemplary punishment, the drama resolves itself through repentance and reconciliation. Gloucester is restored, the rebellious faction is checked, and the threatened movement toward catastrophe gives way to social and dynastic repair. As a result, the play is perhaps best understood as a hybrid form: a history play infused with farce, disguise, and comic intrigue, yet still deeply concerned with loyalty, legitimacy, and order.

Authorship

The play’s authorship remains uncertain. Various candidates have been proposed over the years, including Anthony Munday, Antony Wadeson, Henry Chettle, and Thomas Dekker. Of these, Chettle and Wadeson emerge as especially plausible possibilities. The play’s title page states that it was “lately played” by the Lord High Admiral’s servants, and while no surviving record definitively confirms its performance history, the context of the Admiral’s Men is suggestive. Wadeson, for example, was paid in 1601 for a play titled The Honourable Life of the Humorous Earl of Gloucester and his Conquest of Portugal, a detail which resonates with Gloucester’s trajectory in Looke About You. At the very least, the play appears to belong to the theatrical world of the Admiral’s Men at the turn of the seventeenth century and may have been written, in part, to capitalise on the stage popularity of Robin Hood in the 1590s.

My edition is based on the 1600 quarto held in the Huntington Library and cross-referenced with later editions, especially W. W. Greg’s Malone Society text of 1913. Editorial intervention has been deliberately restrained. I have supplied a dramatis personae, since the original quarto lacks one, but I have not imposed act and scene divisions. Elsewhere, spelling, punctuation, and layout have been regularised only where needed for clarity and readability, without altering the substance or dramatic movement of the original. In this respect, the edition aims to occupy a middle ground: preserving the texture of the early modern text while making it approachable for students, scholars, and general readers alike.

In short, Looke About You deserves to be read not merely as a curiosity on the fringes of the canon, but as a lively, unusual, and theatrically intelligent play. It is a drama of suspicion, performance, and survival; a work in which Robin Hood appears in unexpected company; and a reminder that the world of early modern theatre was far richer and stranger than the handful of routinely anthologised texts might suggest. If this edition helps bring the play to a wider readership, it will have done its job.

Licensing

This edition is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC 4.0). Readers are welcome to use, share, and adapt this material for non-commercial purposes, so long as they give appropriate credit to Stephen Basdeo. Any commercial reuse requires permission from the editor.

The PDF has also been archived on the Internet Archive.